Okay, maybe Sonic Heroes WAS that bad...

I hate the fucking game so much. For me it marked the beginning of Sonic's recent trend downward. Unleashed was a spark of hope, but the Werehog quickly dimmed it out to me.

 

I loved Heroes. Even though the controls were riduculous, it was a mix of old and new and I loved it!

 

I liked it quite a bit. I think $2.50 is a pretty decent price for it at Gamestop for the PC version.

Kinda crazy that it would end up in a crane game, though.

 

It's also the PC version, as opposed to the console version. I went out and bought the PC version, new, at Gamestop, for five bucks. This was three years ago.

As for Sonic Heroes as a game, I did enjoy it (the GameCube version) quite a bit (except for the hunting bits in the Chaotix story, some of it took way too long), but now I can't play it. I've tried to sit down and play through a team story and quit after Ocean Palace because...I dunno. Maybe I just burnt out on it years ago when it came out. I've got at least 70 hours logged.

 

Yeah, the Chaotix extra missions in particular are pretty hard and unforgiving. The ones for Seaside Hill (hermit crabs, missed the one near the first 1-up) Mystic Mansion (kept missing one blue torch after a corridor), and Final Fortress (can't screw up or you die) took me forever to do; thank heavens I A-ranked them the first time I beat them in one life.

 

Man I couldn't A Rank those later Chaotix missions for shit. I never really played them more than a few times, during general playthroughs (I played through the PS2 version after playing the GCN one for years; OH MY GOOOD), but I pretty much hate them.

I'd have to say my favorite stages were Hang Castle, Frog Forest, and one of the canyon ones (as Sonic or Dark of course).

 

Reminder: only 1 out of 9001 people manage to get anything out of a crane game. Ever. It isn't that cheap as you may think >=P

But yeah, reactions to Heroes are mixed. Some people think it's the best of the 3D games due to the obvious try to recreate somewhat the old-school games (no adventure fields, non-realistic stages, even indirectly the zone system geese), some people think it's the worst Sonic game next to '06 and S1 GBA. I wonder why - but remember that back in its day, Adventure was pretty much in the same position, mainly due to the engine glitches and the adventure system itself.

 

I never really though Heroes was hard at all. In fact, its the only game that I've ever got all seven emeralds.

But I'll say this, Heroes was better than SA2. The only thing good about SA2 was Sonic and Shadow. Tails and Knuckles missions were just awful. Knuckles missions, you spent half an hour running in circles looking for stupid emerald shards, and even when the detector thing beeped, it still rarely helped. As for the shooting missions, hold shoot and walk forward, thats all there was to them.

Heroes really offered a fun game, with little drawbacks. Look, no gimicks in the game. Okay, except the team thing maybe. But was the team thing really that bad. Often enough, sonics too fast for slow platforming, and too twitchy at high speeds. But this let players switch things around to suit the way you want to play. There was no stupid, find the treasure missions, no talk to random villagers, or no overcomplicated depressing story about saving the princess 5 times. But the best thing, it still played just like an old sonic game, and just like how a new one should.

 

Only on some machines. On some, I can win like 10 times in a row. Same with pretty much all those games, if you time it right, you'll win.

 

I like the game, but it's just too tedious after a while. After playing Sonic Unleashed (both versions), I can finally see all the game's major flaws. I think they could've done without Team Dark or something - it's basically just the same thing over and over, and Team Dark's stages are the longest. The ranking system is also kind of retarded - why should the extra missions even be ranked? I know it was that was in Sonic Adventure 2, but I still find it pretty unnecessary at this point. The bosses sucked big time and the game is pretty glitchy at times. Some of the stages themselves I find pretty ugly (namely Grand Metropolis/Power Plant - too much solid blue, green, and grey), but I guess that's just my own personal taste. The game is still fun to play for a while, but I could do without going through the same exact stages 4 times in a row.

It's not the team thing that bothered me, but the fact that almost all of the added "features" were just really cheap "fillers". I'd take ten more stages over nine more characters anyday. And I found the multiplayer particularly useless, especially in comparison to SA2:B's multiplayer.

This was also when they started making Shadow an angsty Mewtwo clone, which didn't even fit well with the rest of the characters in the game at all. Here you've got these cute, comical characters bouncing all over the place exclaiming "Marriage?! No way!" and then you've got this Mr. Hardcore Action Hero Guy popping out of no where with his angsty realistic voice and all. It was still a good game, but it could've used some more effort and better planning.

 

if it can be brought cheap a lot of fair owners will buy shit and throw them into their grabbers, so seeing a well known game like heroes in one is no surprise.

 

Plus, as mentioned above, it's a crane game. Unlike a plushie, a game cover doesn't have as much grip to it, so you would probably end up forking quite a few dollars until you get the video game (unless you're good at crane games). Though it may seem cheap, in the long run, they could make up the money from all the attempts to get it.

Then again, if you can get a game like that out of a crane game in one go, you are darn good. :v:

 

Didn't we just have a Heroes-related topic open to general opinion? o_O

That said, the PC version of Sonic Heroes—and subsequently SADX—have always sold pretty cheap on the commercial market. It doesn't surprise me that a random crane machine gave incentive to spend all kinds of money trying to obtain it. I remember at a local skating rink a few years back in New York had a reflex machine that offered several games and music CDs as rewards. With the proper skill, you could get any of them for like a quarter. Pretty sweet deal if you're good at that kind of stuff!

Also keep in mind that the game is 5 years old at this point and on the last generation of systems for the most part, so I can't imagine it's in too much demand nowadays. :v:

 

Ah, my bad then. Thanks for clarifying. :v: Still, even with the handles, inexperienced players may need to take a couple tries to get it.

 

I've played those. They're really totally rigged. I'm quite sure of it. (How else could the operators make money from it anyway?)

 

Even to this day, I still think it's a very well designed game. With the best grapic and art direction of its generation. I'm still extrememly impressed with the way they handled the graphics quality in the environments. Seriously, just stop and look around with the C-Stick. The enemy designs are another story.
What makes me angry is when people say the graphics are messed up because the characters have a shine on them.... Honestly, on the front cover, it says in bold letters "All New Sonic".

I just wish the programming was up to par. I'm not sure what happened in that area, considering it was the same members that coded SA2. But I suppose they were better working with dreamcast hardware. Still, it's a good game. And I still play it a lot. Just don't go and start saying, why isn't this Sonic Adventure 3? Otherwise you won't enjoy it. You have to look at it from the developers perspective in what they wanted players to feel when they play it.

 

I always took that to mean it was a new Sonic game (whereas the previous GameCube Sonic games to that point were ports of games from other consoles) rather than a "new look" Sonic. And yes, the shine DID bother me. I mean, the characters all looked like plastic shells of themselves! And Shadow wasn't even black anymore, he somehow magically turned gray thanks to all the gloss he was given.

Shiny complaints aside, I have some mixed reactions to Sonic Heroes. Yes, the graphics are pretty (aside from the characters) and some minor things pay somewhat of an homage to older Sonic titles in certain areas (two levels and then a boss, good stuff there). My main gripes are about the physics engine (something about the way the characters accelerate and decelerate just rubs me the wrong way. Just a touch and you're off!), the constant switching between characters (seriously, why couldn't they just do a SA1-type thing where different characters play different parts of the same level?), the absurdly long levels (any time a Sonic level takes more than five minutes to complete, it's just too long. More, shorter levels would have sufficed rather than less, longer levels), and the sheer monotony of it all (going through the same exact 14 levels as all four teams does not make for a fun time in this gamer's eyes). Plus, the two pure-grinding levels annoyed me to no end (are bottomless pits the only way Sonic Team can think to kill us anymore?).

In the end, Heroes had its few bright points, but the negatives are certainly there and glaring in many areas. It's just too much for me to label it a truly great, entertaining game. I'd rather go fire up Sonic Spinball and beat that for the billionth time.

 

A better system:

the player has 3 actions buttons
One for Sonic's ability (the one he got is useless outside of, "climb the pole, stupid", where all you had to do was recognize that you needed to use the pole to ascend, and it was done with one button press) I'd suggest a spin dash.
One to have Knuckles attack or something
One to make tails fly. Instead of toggling to whatever ability you want to use, you just hit the button for the ability you want.